The Today programme -yet another bad trial of acupuncture

I was ased to give an opinion on a dire paper published by the BMJ journal, Acupuncture in Medicine. The statistical analysis was so bad that even Mike Cummings, an editor if the journal that pubished it, admitted that the paper failed to show anything useful. He didn't explain why, that being the case, they'd published it.
There are some technical details in the Science Media Centre handout. at www.dcscience.n...
The most important comments were "What's the first thing that any responsible parent thinks of if their baby is crying? Stick needles into it!". And of course the appropriate control group would have been to cuddle the baby.